As writing teachers and crime scene investigators know,a hundred different people could witness the sameincident and describe it differently. But only Raymond Queneau, a French author with ties to the Surrealistmovement, has put all one hundred accounts into a book.

Okay, not quite one hundred. Queneaustopped after ninety-nine retellings ofhis story (at least in the first editionof his work). The resulting book,Exercises in Style (1947), may havestarted as a lark, but is now Queneau'smost beloved work, translated intomore than 30 languages, from Pashtoto Esperanto—not an easy feat, giventhe author’s frequent wordplay anduntranslatable effects in the originalFrench.

Who would imagine that the repetitionof the same sequence of events, presented 99 times ina row, would result in a classic? And Queneau adds tothe challenge by choosing a banal incident as the recurring 'plot' of Exercises in Style, a humdrum encounter withouteven enough drama or inherent interest to justify a shortstory, let alone a whole book of them.

Here is the incident: a young man on a crowded busgets upset at a fellow passenger, whom he accuses of stepping on his toes whenever people get on or off the vehicle. After a testy exchange, the young man movesto a vacant seat. Later that same day, he is seen standingin front of a train station, where a friend is advising himto adjust one of the buttons on his overcoat.

That’s all?

Yes, that's all. Oh, Queneau throws in a few more details.We are told that the young man has a long neck, andwears a plaited string on his hat instead of a ribbon, butnot much more. The key milestones in the narrative arc—if I can apply such noble phrase on so meager a tale—remain stepped-on toes and a poorly-placed button. Your Uncle Willie’s 16 millimeter vacation films are aparagon of excitement by comparison.

But the very banality of the raw material makesQueneau's achievement all the more impressive. Asthe title of the book states clearly, only the style of the narrations draws the reader into this oft-told tale. Weread the story in the form of an astrological forecast:"When midday strikes you will be on the rear of a bus…."Or in the style of an official letter: "I beg to advise youof the following facts….Today, at roughly twelve noon,I was present on the platform of a bus….." Or deliveredwith scientific precision: "In a bus of the S-line, 10 meterslong, 3 wide, 6 high, at 3 km. 600 m. from its startingpoint…." We get it in the passive voice: "It was midday. The bus was being got into by passengers…." Weread the story as conveyed by a telegram: "BUSCROWDED STOP…."

No Hollywood studio will ever make a movie outof Exercises in Style (although some very fine movies,from Rashomon to Vantage Point have drawn on thesame concept of multiple narratives of a single incident). Nor will a reader looking for a gripping page-turner findmuch reason to turn these pages. But writers, andespecially aspiring writers, can benefit from Queneau'squirky volume. Anyone teaching a class on fictiontechniques should consider this for the syllabus—anda perfect class assignment would be to invite studentsto come up with their own version of the bus-and-buttonstory.

That said, I have my gripes with Queneau. Like manyof his colleagues in the Oulipo movement—a loosegathering of experimental authors that also includedFrançois Le Lionnais, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino—he is almost obsessively interested in wordplay andnumeric patterns. This led Queneau to include a dozenor so almost unreadable chapters in Exercises in Style,based on anagrams, pig Latin, spoonerisms or othermind-numbing methods of rearranging letters on a page. Iam hardly opposed to word games, and have a lamentablehabit of indulging in alliterations, puns and other ignoble techniques in my own writing. But Queneau goes several steps too far in his mania, and soon forgets that there is difference between an exercise in style and a puzzle. A cryptogram is not prose, no matter how cleverlyconstructed.

On the other hand, how unfortunate that Queneau did notlook around at his own intellectual circles in postwarFrance, and build some chapters on the reigning dogmasand ideologies of his day. I would have happily read aMarxist account of the bus story, as well Freudian, Fascist, Existentialist, Jungian and Behaviorist, to cite a fewpromising perspectives on the inhumanity of bus passengerto bus passenger. I am still unsure about whether such ideologies grasp the essence of our quotidian lives, butthey definitely impact how true believers write stories, andany inquiry into style that ignores the sway of ideology is inevitably incomplete.

Yet Queneau, for all my fault-finding, still retains his placein the syllabus, and demands inclusion on any seriouswriter's bookshelf. Nor will this change for the foreseeable future…and for a very good reason: no one else has donea better job at exploring the range of narrative styles inone compact work. But someone else should writeanother book of this sort, updating and expanding theconcept, with less wordplay and more satirical insight.I could only imagine what a Zadie Smith or a JonathanLethem, a David Mitchell or Jennifer Egan would do witha similar project. (Indeed, Lethem contributes his homageto Queneau in the new English translation of Exercises inStyle.) Given the ascendancy of fragmented and recursive narrative techniques in current-day literary fiction, the experimental approach that Queneau unleashed onan unsuspecting public back in the 1940s might justfind an even more receptive audience in the presentmoment.